Rader, a Harleysville resident and environmental educator with the Perkiomen Watershed Conservancy, came across a program researching animals on Bioko Island serendipitously while talking to her advisor for a master’s degree program at Arcadia University. She asked Professor Gail Hearns, now at Drexel University, if she could volunteer for the program. Hearns, who studies the secluded island’s primates, asked Rader is she would study the sea turtles. Rader jumped at the chance, joining the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program, which is now in its 14th year.

“I studied and studied,” Rader told a group of high school and middle school students. After two years she traveled to Bioko, an island the size of Rhode Island with many unique animals.

“There are species you can’t find anywhere else,” said Rader. The northern part of the island is oil rich, with oil company wells. But the southern portion is “virgin rain forest,” she said, and a nearly pristine habitat.

A writer and four photographers from the “National Geographic Magazine” came to document the wildlife on Bioko and published an article and photographs in August 2008. Rader shared slides of some of those striking photos and her own with the students during her talk. Some eleven species of primates and four sea turtle species make their home on Bioko, she said.

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Part of Equatorial Guinea, a country on the west coast of Africa, Bioko is “a truly tropical environment.”

The residents of the island would ferry her to camp where she researched the sea turtles and she was surprised to find out that one of the men on the boat was a turtle poacher. She had to swim across a river to get to the camp because villagers refused to go past a certain rock for superstitious reasons. Conditions at the camp are rather primitive, where the scientists wash in the river, cook over a fire and dig holes for their latrine. The carry out everything that they bring in, she said.

The scientists measure the turtles, who come to the black sand beach to lay their eggs, They tag the turtles and take DNA samples, gathering data to help preserve the reptiles.

“You didn’t know there was a Jane Goodall in Harleysville,” said Cheryle Radcliff, career development coordinator, told the students. She pointed out that Rader, who is also a volunteer at the Elwood Park Zoo, got her start by volunteering. Rader spoke to high school and middle school students as part of the SAHS Career Pathway program.

Inspired by the beauty of the island and the turtles, Rader wrote a children’s book, “Moon over Bioko,” beautifully illustrated by her friend, Holly Smith. The book, published last July, tells a story about a boy living on Bioko.

She started her own company, Wildlife Conservation Publishers, to distribute book, which has been translated into Spanish, the language of Bioko.

“Moon over Bioko” is available at www.biokobooks.com and at the Harleysville Book Store. Proceeds from the book sold at the books store are going toward fundraising for the sea turtles and for a new library at the Perkiomen Watershed, where the previous library was destroyed by Hurricane Irene. Otherwise the proceeds will go to the sea turtle research at the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program. Rader, meanwhile, is at work on a sequel about the monkeys of Bioko.

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